My first day at Cashmere High

My alarm woke me up at 7 am. It was the 1st of February 2009. My body was still damaged from the yet lag of the long flight the day before. It took my eyes a couple of minutes to realize where I was, and what was about to happen the following day. I got out of bed, went into the bathroom to shower up before going upstairs for breakfast with my new Host family. My Host mother had told me the night before she would drop me of at School before going to work. I sad there around the table, wearing a black shirt and a colour full t-shirt and felt how every bite of toast was a effort to press down. I finished of my coffee and went downstairs to back my school bag.
Ten minutes later I was there. My host mother left in front of a door saying “Cashmere High head office” I Went inside and turned to the front desk immediately where a woman wearing a blue dress sat. I told her my name, and where I was from. She pointed me through another door going into a bigger hall way. There I found another 10 foreign student nervously standing around. We stood there for a while too shy to start the first conversation, waiting for someone telling us what to do. A short foreign looking lady came in to the room to greet us all welcome. Here name tag said “Mr. yogi, International support coordinator” . She was going to show us around the school for a start. We got handed a map, telling us where all the different classrooms were and how to find our way around. We walked around for what felt like ages. My mind was too occupied with all the new impressions to notice where she was taking us. She left us in the main hall with another 1800 student in uniform for the principles speech. All seats were taking, and the only place we could squeeze in was right in front of the stage on the left side. We stood there for about an hour listening to the principle greeting us all welcome to a new year at Cashmere high. Year 7 students were placed in the very front row. They all looked tidy and nervous, wearing their white socks just perfectly up the ankles in their clean new black shoes. The uniforms everyone had on was identically similar. It was a dark red sweater with the inscription Cashmere high on it and with chequered white and red shirt going just below the knees. They all looked at least as nervous as we were. I stood next to a girl from France. Her name was Elsa and she was from Toulouse she had told me. She was taller than me, had her dark hair in a high pony tail with a thick yellow hair tie wrapped around it. She seemed confident and calm about the situation.
After the assembly Mr. Yogi took us back to a class room, where we got introduced to the different classes we could pick this year.
At 2 pm we were free to leave she said, and people started packing up their things and leaving out the doorway. My host mother had made an arrangement with a boy from the year below, living close to our place, to take me along on the bus. So there I stood in front of Blok P where I was supposed to meet him looking for someone I didn’t know how looked. After a couple of minutes a short, curly haired boy in uniform came up and asking if I was Selma. We walked almost in silence to the bus stop, where a green bus picked us up. He told me the name of the bus “The Orbiter” and that it was the only bus going all the way around Christchurch. We got off at a Petrol station, close by where I lived. He took me down a main street called Colombo Street, and then up a hill and left me just in the driveway of my new home.